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A comment on WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web. Parent comment

Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th... by filoleg on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:38PM (#23228675)
I would be careful with using this method and check the generated PDF versions with your eyes before writing them off as "all is good, it is archived now".

I recently got bitten by that, when I was trying to print out some page in Chrome, and it was rendering as a bunch of white space surrounded by some elements from the page, but without any actual content I cared about. Turns out, my situation isn't that uncommon for pages that are heavily JS-dependent

Note: I am not saying JS=bad. This has nothing to do with JS itself and everything to do with how JS is used to generate/render the page. A lot of pages just don't bother with doing it the right way that doesn't screw up generated PDFs.

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Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th... by fit2rule on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:41PM (#23228703)
I've since learned in this thread that Chrome and Firefox are not as good as Safari for this technique - it hasn't impacted me much since I only use Chrome/Firefox for development, mostly.

And although I do occasionally check the produced PDF's, the layout doesn't matter to me at all since I use a cmd-line grep or combination of 'pdftotext' to find the page, open the PDF, and click the link to go to the original web page if I need to .. haven't found a single dud PDF in the collection in a randomised sampling, but then again in 20,000+ files, there's bound to be one that didn't make it through the rendering pipeline, but so far, hasn't been an issue.

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Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th... by filoleg on Monday May 18, 2020 @07:26PM (#23229574)
That clarifies it a lot, thanks for explaining.

I actually remember having to eventually go through Safari to print out that one page I mentioned above that was giving me issues in Chrome, so that makes a lot of sense. Glad to find out it wasn't just me somehow being lucky with Safari, and that it is actually a known thing.

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